Some artists arrive at painting after a lifetime of looking. Cristian Bugatti — known to Italy simply as Bugo — arrived at it by walking away from the thing that had made him famous.
A celebrated and wilfully eccentric Italian singer-songwriter, Bugo stepped back from records and stages between 2008 and 2014 and gave himself almost entirely to painting, installation and street work. For four of those years, from 2010 to 2014, he and his partner lived in India — and it was there, far from the Italian music press, that his most striking visual gesture took shape.
“French Fries Killing Lovers”
Among the works of that period was a piece titled French Fries Killing Lovers, shown on the streets of New Delhi and covered at the time in these pages. Working in and around Ghaziabad and the capital, Bugo built surreal phrases out of cut newspaper clippings and mounted them as billboards against a flat red ground — language torn from its context and handed back to passers-by as something between a poem and a provocation.
During the India Art Fair he also exhibited a self-portrait directly on the open street, quietly collapsing the distance between the gallery and the pavement that so much contemporary art works hard to preserve.
The elitism of the unannounced gesture
What makes the Indian work compelling is precisely that it asked for nothing. There was no album to sell, no stage, no Italian audience primed to recognise the name. A celebrated musician chose, for a few years, to be an anonymous maker of strange red signs in a city that did not know him. That is a rarer kind of ambition than fame — and exactly the kind of quiet, deliberate beauty this magazine was built to notice.
Bugo eventually returned to music, but the India years remain one of the more honest second acts in recent Italian culture: an artist who had every reason to repeat himself, and chose instead to disappear into a new language.